It
all started with Lamneth.
Yep, that's it. Basically, it's all his fault.

On November 23, 2002, the
GoldGarbage
travel bug (owned by HotFoot)
appeared in the Double
Agent geocache with a strange story about its mysterious disappearance (found
on the Psittacosis
travel bug page). It was placed in the cache by a SF2062,
who, aside from this action, had no identity at all.

At the time, I wasn't exactly
sure who SF2062 was, but I suspected Lamneth. I was extremely impressed
by Double Agent, which still ranks as my favorite cache ever. So I decided to
play along and make a real double-agent plot. I created a new account
for Venona,
took the bug in the middle of the night, and left cryptic notes on both pages.
The details of the
Venona account are amusing, even though they were visible only to the geocaching.com
admins. Venona has a two cutout email addresses, a hometown of Moscow, Russia,
and his own website.

Venona first emailed Lamneth
to verify that he would be willing to undertake "activities" to regain
the bug. The message was:

We have Gold Garbage travel bug.
Is our hostage. If your friend wants to see travel bug again you must rescue.
You will tell us you are willing to do activities for regain bug. Email us
to willingness.

Lamneth agreed to the proposal.
The first "activity" that Venona required was emailed to both Lamneth
and Hotfoot. It consisted of the following message:

First activity is ready. Go to location
and reply word. Location: B543 TK7872 V3C6
P399 Is not cipher. You must do
in 36 hours, after I will remove.

Lamneth responded incredibly
quickly (in less then 90 minutes), having broken the code. He wrote:

I'm sorry, but I don't have access
to B543. Perhaps you can tell me the word that was placed on Page 399 of the
book Microwave Magnetrons?

Well, Venona wasn't about
to let Lamneth get away with that. He responded:

I am most sorry. Perhaps you have
friend who can help?

Which friend, of course,
would be me. Lamneth then contacted me (the real me, this time) and asked:

Can you go look on page 399 of "Magnetic
Magnetrons" by George Collins? (The call number is TK7872 V3C6) I believe
there's a word written on a piece of paper or something... Please let me know.

Here I made my first mistake.
I didn't act puzzled enough. I just agreed to do it. But, of course, I didn't
find any note in the book, since the main Lab library is not in B543. I actually
went and looked up the book, just in case Lamneth was watching me. I wrote him
back, and the following exchange happened:

fizzy> Are you sure that's the right book?

lamneth> If it was in B543 then it's the right book.

fizzy> Is this part of a cache or something? If it is, why haven't I heard
about it? And why would they place a stage at the Lab? It's not exactly accessible!

lamneth> It's part of a game that "Venona" is playing :)

fizzy> P.S. I forgot to tell you that I can scan in my copy of page 399
if you want.

lamneth> That would be great! Thanks for your help.

Most of the rest of this
phase of the story is in the forums, where I wrote it. I went to B543, found
the book, "removed" the note (which never got placed in the first
place), and copied the title of the report next to the book, which was entitled
Refractory Semiconductor Materials, and was by three Russians. I sent Lamneth
a scanned copy of the note and the title page.

Here's the note:

And the title page from
that report next to the book:

And there was my second
mistake. I hand-wrote the note. Even though I tried to disguise my handwriting,
I didn't do it well enough.

REFRACTORY is a neat word,
and (as others later deduced) I chose it on purpose. By the way, at this point
I had figured out the whole SF2062 thing, having discovered an interesting
Rush
website that tied Lamneth, Syrinx, SF2062, and Lamneth's neat star logo
together.

There are still unresolved
questions about this whole episode:

How did Lamneth know
that the code referred to a building at the Lab?

Where did Lamneth get
the title of the book? I couldn't find it online.

I still don't
know if Lamneth works at the Lab or not. Drat!

I wrote up the whole thing
for the forums to generate a little interest for the Bay Area geocachers. Didn't
take long for suspicions to be aired and general finger-pointing to begin. Very
fun!

Not much else happened
for a while. There was an email exchange with HotFoot, and a certain amount
of speculation on the forums. Venona now appeared in the forums, and I decided
that he would make all subsequent communications publicly, in the Bay Area thread.

A couple of days before
I left for a cruise in December, Venona published the main cipher on the forum:

Here is next activity for
retrieve Gold Garbage Travel Bug.
Decipher message below. Activity must complete before 31 December 2002.
Remember word from first activity.

There was actually a lot
of thought that went into the design of this cipher. I wanted to use something
that would involve the original Venona concept; that is, the re-use of a one-time
pad. I wanted to avoid a "toy" cipher that would easily be solved
by hand, but I wanted the cipher to be crackable in a reasonable time frame
by amateurs. I also wanted to incorporate the keyword from the first "activity."

I am actually quite proud
of the result. The above cipher consists of two parts: the first is the word
REFRACTORY repeated and
encrypted using the RC4
stream cipher; that's a professional-grade encryption job. The second part is
the message encrypted using the same RC4 key, essentially re-using a one-time
pad. I left a few clues in the cipher to point the way to the solution. First,
the hexadecimal nature of the data was meant to suggest using computers to solve
the cipher. Second, the separation of the cipher into two parts was meant to
indicate the notion of parallel texts, and maybe key re-use. Third, the first
part was one byte longer than the second, which would imply that it contained
the key, since more than enough key material would be present to allow complete
decryption of the second part.

While I was on my cruise,
I logged in to the Internet a couple of times from the ship (at $0.75 a minute,
I'll have you know!) and wrote a few notes as Venona in the Bay Area thread.
I went to some lengths to misdirect people; I never logged in as myself (you'll
note that if you go to a cacher's page it shows the last time they logged in)
and tried to post at times that would be appropriate for someone being on the
West Coast. I'm not sure how many people this fooled, but it was fun. Here's
a picture of moonrise over St. Thomas from the cruise:

The ship is very nice, by
the way. Highly recommended.

The cipher was
solved in 6 days by a dedicated group of Bay Area geocachers working together.
Impressive! The decoded message was:

GoldGarbage Travel Bug will be placed
in Double Agent cache at 12:00 Noon on December 31, 2002. It will be removed
at 1:00 PM same day if not retrieved.

There are a couple of minor
mistakes here. First, Venona always referred to the travel bug as "Gold
Garbage," using two words, even though the actual name is one word. This
note was the only place where I slipped. Second, after a couple of days I knew
that just putting the bug into the cache at the appointed time would be a huge
letdown to all those who had worked so hard on the problem.

So now I had to think up
something suitably entertaining for December 31, something that (hopefully)
wouldn't get me caught. I initially thought of putting the bug in an (ahem)
alternate but related location, but I was afraid that it would be manned. So
then I came upon the idea of placing some kind of note that would point to the
location of a new cache that would contain the bug. I decided to make a two-part
cryptogram; one part would consist of quotations and have enough text that it
could be solved using standard cryptogram techniques. That part would be placed
in the alternate location the night before. The second part would be required
to get the actual cache location, but would be too short to allow for easy solution.

The night before the Big
Day, I placed the new cache (Double
Trouble) with the travel bug in it. In doing so, I took a bit of a chance;
somebody could conceivably have found it before the proper moment the next day.
On Sunday I had arranged with some high-school-age girls in my church choir
to deliver the note. I figured it would give HotFoot a thrill. I also placed
the cryptogram in the alternate location and prepared ths cache page for Double
Trouble.

The Double Trouble cache
page was approved at 11:00 AM on December 31, just at the perfect time. I delievered
the final note to the girls at 11:40 and arrived at the meeting place at 11:45.
People were there, and nearly everyone arrived by noon. This rather threatening
card was in the Double Agent cache when we got there:

As it happened, nobody
even went to the alternate location! I started off towards it with Chugal
(conveniently not being at the main spot when the girls arrived), but we were
recalled when the note was delivered. I could easily have just placed the bug
in the alternate location and gotten off without a trace!

Unfortunately, the people
now had the note with the cache coordinates on it, but nobody had the longer
cryptogram that held the key to it! And they only had an hour to find the cache.
So, thinking quickly, I came up with some helpful hints and the group (led by
The Rat)
solved it without use of the long cryptogram.

Then I saw it. Disaster!
I had made a mistake on the coordinates for the cache with the bug in it! About
a quarter-mile worth of mistake! And everybody was taking off to the wrong location!

Pepper
and I were going to drive there together. As she went to tell Claire
to wait for HotFoot (who had been delayed), I grabbed a dollar bill in my car,
quickly wrote a note correcting the error on it, and put it in a small ziplock
bag. I was going to have to use my magician's skills to figure out how to save
the situation on the fly.

When we got to the coordinates,
everyone was wandering in the streets. Apparently, the coorindates were in sombody's
back yard. Fortuitously, there was an object in the street that resembled the
hint given with the cache coordinates. Pretending to search the object, I slipped
my dollar-bill note into an inconspicuous (but not too inconspicuous) place.
And if Mary
hadn't been watching me like a hawk, I would have gotten away with it, too!
I moved away, and after a couple of minutes Pepper found the note, and we all
headed to the (now correct) cache location.

Meanwhile, I found out
that Chuguy
had run the license plates of the car my high-school accomplices had used, and
was acting like he was going to go interrogate everyone at their house. I can
just imagine Chuguy and The Rat doing Good Cop/Bad Cop on those poor kids. That,
and the fact that Bill of Green Achers was acting like he was worried about
getting fired for being under suspicion, and I folded.

So I confessed. I'd make
a lousy criminal. But it sure was fun while it lasted!